Related papers: Algorithmic independence of initial condition and …
Although it has been notoriously difficult to pin down precisely what it is that makes life so distinctive and remarkable, there is general agreement that its informational aspect is one key property, perhaps the key property. The unique…
Recent theoretical progress in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, linking the physical principle of Maximum Entropy Production ("MEP") to the information-theoretical "MaxEnt" principle of scientific inference, together with conjectures from…
We argue that (1) our perception of time through change and (2) the gap between reality and our observation of it are at the heart of both quantum mechanics and the dynamical mechanism of physical systems. We suggest that the origin of…
We propose a method to classify the causal relationship between two discrete variables given only the joint distribution of the variables, acknowledging that the method is subject to an inherent baseline error. We assume that the causal…
New exact results about the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of open quantum systems at arbitrary timescales are obtained by considering all possible variations of initial conditions of a system, its environment, and correlations between them.…
Thermodynamics, and in particular its first law, is of fundamental importance to Science, and therefore of great general interest to all physicists. The first law, although undoubtedly true, and believed by everyone to be true because of…
It is shown in the framework of a harmonic system that the thermodynamical time arrow is induced by the environmental initial conditions in a manner similar to spontaneous symmetry breaking. The Closed Time Path formalism is introduced in…
Causal phenomena associated with rare events occur across a wide range of engineering problems, such as risk-sensitive safety analysis, accident analysis and prevention, and extreme value theory. However, current methods for causal…
Constraint-based causal discovery algorithms utilize many statistical tests for conditional independence to uncover networks of causal dependencies. These approaches to causal discovery rely on an assumed correspondence between the…
In this paper we present a discussion of the basic aspects of the well-known problem of prediction and inference in physics, with specific attention to the role of models, the use of data and the application of recent developments in…
The second law of thermodynamics - the usual statement of the arrow of time - has been called the most fundamental law of physics. It is thus difficult to conceive that a single dynamical system could contain subsystems, in significant…
We show that fundamental thermodynamic relations can be derived from deterministic mechanics for a non-ergodic system. This extend a similar derivation for ergodic systems and suggests that ergodicity should not be considered as a…
The first-passage time is proposed as an independent thermodynamic parameter of the statistical distribution that generalizes the Gibbs distribution. The theory does not include the determination of the first passage statistics itself. A…
The existence of a thermodynamic arrow of time in the present universe implies that the initial state of the observable portion of our universe at (or near) the ``big bang'' must have been very ``special''. We argue that it is not plausible…
This is a general description of a probabilistic formalism of mechanics, i.e., an extension of the Newtonian mechanics principles to the systems undergoing random motion. From an analysis of the induction procedure from experimental data to…
The problem of the insensitivity of the macroscopic behavior of any thermodynamical system to partitioning generates a bias between the reproducibility of its macroscopic behavior viewed as the simplest form of causality and its long-term…
In a previous paper [Pearl and Verma, 1991] we presented an algorithm for extracting causal influences from independence information, where a causal influence was defined as the existence of a directed arc in all minimal causal models…
Algorithmic entropy can be seen as a special case of entropy as studied in statistical mechanics. This viewpoint allows us to apply many techniques developed for use in thermodynamics to the subject of algorithmic information theory. In…
In statistical mechanics the zeroth law of thermodynamics is taken as a postulate which, as its name indicates, logically precedes the first and second laws. Treating it as a postulate has consequences for how temperature is introduced into…
A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system's state retains information about past environmental fluctuations,…